Our Uncertain Future Archives | Page 7 of 10

Balancing energy security with food security on solar farms

The economic impacts of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are being felt around the world. This is especially true in the energy and food markets whose supply chains depend on both countries. The crisis has reinvigorated a long-running debate about land use for solar farms, increasingly polarised around energy versus food security. Gas provides 40%

Energy Balance

“Four Meals From Anarchy” – We Must Grow More Food Locally. A friend sent me a link to this video interview of Michael Raw, an agricultural consultant, about the fragility of Britain’s food supply, which frankly shocked me. The “four meals from anarchy” is a quote to MI5, meaning that Britain could descend very rapidly indeed to large-scale

Real preppers aren’t panicking about nuclear war because they’ve always been ready with a plan in place

‘Rational’ preppers tell Kasia Delgado about preparing for everything from nuclear strikes to bank collapse to drought: “If a prepper has to panic-buy, they’ve failed” David Bowen recently found a good place in his North Yorkshire seaside town to take refuge in case of a nuclear attack. “I’ve just discovered there’s an old underground

How To Start A Permaculture Garden

Anyone concerned with sustainable living will at some point sooner or later come across the concept of permaculture. Permaculture is notoriously difficult to define, but the term is a portmanteau of the words ‘permanent,’ and ‘agriculture,’ although it was later expanded to include ‘culture,’ as it encompasses much more than just agriculture. Permaculture was

How Food Prices Are Affected by Fossil Fuels

We don't just drive or heat with fossil fuels—we are eating them. Oil and gas prices are at record levels, and this is going to have a big impact on our diet in very short order because we don't just drive or heat with fossil fuels—we are eating them. Traditional US Homestead -

A 1970s paper predicted societal collapse in 2040 – here’s what the analyst who confirmed it says

Her Harvard thesis offers a bleak outlook on the course of civilization but sustainability expert Gaya Herrington tells Louise Boyle that the worst-case scenario is not inevitable. ‘We need to completely re-envision what our role is in the world’ When her study – confirming a 1970s prediction that humanity’s unquenchable desire for economic growth would hit a wall

Dennis Meadows on the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Limits to Growth

Only rarely does a book truly change the world. In the nineteenth century, such a book was Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. For the twentieth century, it was The Limits to Growth. Not only did this best-selling 1972 publication help spur the environmental movement, but it showed that the underlying dynamics of the modern industrial world

Crisis Gardening: Growing enough food to feed your family

With the current pandemic, the damage to food production and supply chains has already been set in stone. It’s just a matter of time before the full effects of these unfortunate events trickle down to cause a shortage of food in your local area. As a crisis gardener, you want to hedge against this

A Prayer for Nonbelievers

I was ten years old when The Limits to Growth first saw print. I have a dim memory of seeing a newspaper article or two about it, but I had other things on my mind in 1972—my parents got divorced that year, and an already difficult childhood promptly got much worse—and several years passed

The Future is a Landscape

I’ve been reflecting of late about the way that our habitual expectations about change blind us to the way that change actually happens. One of the most important of these is the frankly weird but pervasive notion that the future is a single place, where only one kind of thing happens. It’s always “The Future,”

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